> All, IEEE Spectrum have asked me to write a paper on Unix to celebrate the
> 40th anniversary of the release of 1st Edition in November 1971. I'm after
> ideas & suggestions!
of course this quote is always good for a chuckle:
Ken Thompson was once asked what he would do differently if he were
redesigning the UNIX system. His reply: "I'd spell creat with an e."
[http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kenneth_Thompson]
and I always liked this quote from Linus Torvalds:
On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Rik van Riel wrote:
> The real issue here is paradigms. The classical "everything's
> a file" broke down with the advent of networking, sockets and
> non-blocking reads. At the moment the file paradigm is so much
> out of touch with computational reality that web servers need
> to fork for each client and people are crying out for asynchronous
> sendfile and other weird interfaces.
Sure. But I think it's still a valid paradigm to consider "everything is a
stream of bytes". And that's _really_ what the UNIX paradigm has been from
the first: the whole notion of pipes etc is not all that different from
networking.
[http://groups.google.com/group/fa.linux.kernel/msg/7bcbbfeaea2b93c9?hl=en&d…]
> I'm also trying to chase down some quotes; my memory seems to be failing me
> but I'm sure I've seen these somewhere:
ugh..my memory is failing too at the moment. I'm sure I once read a
nice rant of sorts about how Unix has proven to be of sound design
that has adapted well to changes in the computing landscape...
Anyone remember picasso, a vector graphics GUI app
that generated pic(1) source?
I know nothing of it, anyone got a screenshot even?
is the source available?
was its frontend X11 or blit terminal?
Was it related to the blit cip and xcip tools
or are they a different genus?
Thanks for any info.
-Steve
I figured you guys may get a kick out of this...
You can download a 'ready to run' version here:
http://code.google.com/p/vak-opensource/downloads/detail?name=dvk-demos.zip…
Included is a modified version of SIMH's PDP-11 emulator with a new
disk controller. Binaries are included for both Linux & Win32.
Source to his additions are here:
http://vak-opensource.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/bk/simh-dvk/
And the source to version 2.2 of Demos has been provided here:
ftp://ftp.besm6.org/pub/archives/d22.tar.gz
Oh control+n lets you input in russian, and control+o lets you input in english.
>From what I understand DEMOS is derived from 2.9 BSD..
I don't speak Russian and what I end up doing is cutting & pasting
into google translate... For some really bizarre translations.
Demos is Copyright 1991 by Research Institute "Scientific Centre", lab 462/2.
I thought you guys may enjoy this...
http://aiju.de/code/pdp11/
It's a PDP-11 with a teletype console, and a RK05 with Unix v6.
Because browsers are weird, here is some of the keycommands...
DEL is the interrupt key (^C on modern *nix), Pause the quit key (^\
or ^L) and PrtScr is EOF (^D).
Jason
Now that Novell has definitively been found by the courts to own the
Unix copyrights AND decided not to sell them in their latest batch of
financial flailing about, I'm wondering what they're going to do about
the Ancient Unix license. While they've promised not to sue anybody
about Unix, I'm wondering if they'll ever officially endorse the
Ancient Unix 4-clause license or perhaps even switch it to something a
little less awkward like a 3-clause BSD clone or the MIT license.
Also, I wonder if perhaps they might be convinced to expand the
license to cover things like System III or maybe even some early
versions of System V. How might one go about making these inquiries?
Hi.
> > Hi. Does anyone remember for sure if "new" awk shipped with System V
> > Release 3.1 or 3.2? I know it wasn't 3.0.
>
> Hi,
>
> http://www.levenez.com/lang/ says 1978 for oawk and 1985 for nawk.
New awk existed inside the Research group for some time before it
filtered out through System V. It was even available separately,
directly from them, to educational institutions. Circa 1986 I got
a copy that way when I worked at the Emory University computing center.
> regarding http://www.levenez.com/unix/, 1978 is between v6 and v7,
> and 1985 is between SVr2 and SVr3.0.
True but not relevant; new awk was released with System V at either
3.1 or 3.2; I'm leaning towards 3.1 since that is what I wrote way back
when in the gawk manual when I knew for sure. :-)
Unless anyone can check the actual sources, I think we should declare
this closed... Thanks to everyone for the feedback.
Arnold
Jaap Akkerhuis wrote:
> Officially it was written by Aho Weinberger Kernighan but
> I suspect Brian did most of the actual coding.
quote of Aho from an interview ---
"We [Aho and Kernighan] had created a grammatical specification for AWK but
hadn't yet created the full run-time environment. Weinberger came along
and said 'hey, this looks like a language I could use myself', and within
a week he created a working run time for AWK."
see http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/216844/a-z_programming_languages_aw…
I know for sure that in 1988's svr3.2 the "awk" command was the 1988 version
and the "oawk" command was the version from 1979.
In svr3.0 the "awk" command was the old and we'd get the new one
from Holmdel's unix tools distribution group (called USTOP) and
install it as "nawk"
I think you could get the new one in stock svr3.1 but cannot
remember it it was provide as "awk" or "nawk."
> Hi. Does anyone remember for sure if "new" awk shipped with System V
> Release 3.1 or 3.2? I know it wasn't 3.0.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Arnold Robbins
Regardless of its technical merits (and I suspect that the implementation may have been pretty bad) RFS was doomed by AT&T's licensing policies and general ineptitude at marketing UNIX. Similarly the widespread adoption of NFS was driven by the fact that Sun made it a de facto standard.
On Thu Mar 31st, 2011 7:51 PM PDT Nick Downing wrote:
>I also looked up EDOTDOT and found reference to RFS but not much info about
>it. Why was it not used? Not reliable enough? I have often thought that
>the stateless, idempotent NFS protocol leaves a lot to be desired due to its
>inability to implement unix semantics (as discussed in the wikipedia stub
>article on RFS), has this been improved with NFS4? Should RFS be revived
>and used? Some of its features sounded quite attractive (location
>transparency, etc). It does appear to have the ability to execute a program
>remotely?? What happens with regard to PIDs, home directory etc in this
>case? Does anyone know?
>cheers, Nick
>
>On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 1:23 PM, Michael Davidson <
>michael_davidson(a)pacbell.net> wrote:
>
>> --- On *Thu, 3/31/11, Random832 <random832(a)fastmail.us>* wrote:
>>
>>
>> EDOTDOT caught my eye for some reason - maybe because it's the only one
>> you attributed to linux in a long list of SVr1 ones... what were 72
>> through 76 in SVR1?
>>
>>
>> As the comment indicates, EDOTDOT came from "RFS" - the almost never used
>> "remote file system" that was (optionally, I think) part of System V Release
>> 3.
>>
>> As best I can recall, that is also where several of the other error numbers
>> in the 72 - 79 range probably came from.
>>
>> Michael Davidson
>>
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